Here are a few reasons growing an email list is a crucial part of online marketing:

More people use and check emails. The number of people who use email will surpass 4 billion by the end of the year (before accounting for any spike related to this isolation). With social distancing and isolation happening right now, even more communication turns to emails.[*]

High return on investment. For every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they can generate $42 in return. That’s an average ROI of 42:1.[*]

You’re in control. You have a direct connection with your audience and customers with an email list. Even if you switch your email service provider, you can export the list, and the email addresses are your asset. On the flip side, you have little or no control over the followers you have on most social media sites.

Targeted segmentation and personalization. Most email service providers allow you to segment your email list and send highly personalized emails. These features make your marketing messages more targeted and relevant to your audience.

Luckily, we’ve been writing about email marketing for years. Here are a few posts that come in handy:

2. Bring Your Business On Shopify

With everyone staying home to #flattenthecurve, many brick-and-mortar stores will see their revenue taking a huge plunge. On the flip side, Amazon is hiring 100,000 people to deal with the surge in online orders.[*]

In short, this is the best time to take your business online.

Many retail businesses have thought about setting up an ecommerce store and bringing their business online — but most of them were not sure where to start.

Our top recommendation: Shopify.

A few quick facts about Shopify:

It’s one of the largest ecommerce platforms in the world, second only to WooCommerce (an ecommerce solution for WordPress sites). It has more users than other platforms such as BigCommerce, Magento, and more.

Shopify offers a suite of services to independent merchants that includes storefront, hosting, marketing, inventory management, shipping, customer service, and more — at an affordable price starting at $29 per month. Due to the impact of COVID-19, Shopify is offering an extended 90-day free trial.[*]

It also has other products: Shopify Plus, an enterprise-level plan that comes with additional features and greater flexibility in customization; and Shopify POS, a solution to integrate Shopify with a retail setting.

The key takeaway here is that content marketing has become increasingly important in the COVID-19 outbreak because more people are searching for what they want online.

It doesn’t need to be content around the current crisis, but content that:

Help your target audience solve the problem they are facing.

Connect your products or services as the solution they are looking for.

It can be intimidating to think about creating online content if you’re a total beginner. But we’re here to help. Content marketing is a huge topic to talk about, so I’ve broken it down into a few different sections.

You can write a high-quality piece of content, but if your formatting is off and difficult to navigate, you’ll have a hard time keeping readers engaged. Here’s the guide on how to format your blog posts so you can keep readers engaged and increase conversions.

CREATE AND LAUNCH A PODCAST

Writing may not be your strength and we get it. A great alternative to starting a blog is to launch a podcast.

With 51% of the U.S. population over 12 having listened to a podcast and 22% listening to podcasts weekly, it’s a huge channel to reach more people.[*]

Here are a few blog posts we recommend you to check out if you’re interested in starting a podcast:

James Schramko, the man behind SuperFastBusiness.com shares his step-by-step guide on how to start and grow a podcast. We called it the 1,000,000 Download Formula.

5. Build An Online Course

For years, people have talked about how online learning could change the world. However, progress is slow. But now, the coronavirus pushes the trend forward as we’re forced to physically isolate ourselves.

Most trends come and go — for example, the demand for toilet paper and hand sanitizers. But it’s not hard to see that online learning, especially for small independent businesses (rather than the traditional education industry), will stay when this is over.

There are many ways you can implement an online course into your business:

Sell knowledge and information. This is straightforward and applicable to many industries like fitness, arts, business and more. If you know something people want to know, you can package it into an online course and sell it.

Educate your audience about your products. Showing your audience how to get the most out of your products increases retention and makes them more likely to become an advocate. Here’s an example of how Ahrefs does it.

Drive more leads into your business. You can use an online course to generate leads for you (best for service-based businesses).

Here are a few posts we highly recommend you to read on building an online course:

We created an online course called Monthly1k in 2013 and generated over $1,000,000 from it. We’ve since closed the course, but the insights we learned still apply to many online courses today. Check out the case study here.